The Swift-Boating of America (MoJo)

Commentary: Iran-Contra: the Mother of All Scandals
By Greg Grandin
Photo: AP/Wide World Photos
June 1, 2006

An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping, manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one is a bribery case involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes, secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and -- wait for it -- the Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians a good time.

Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good reason -- they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at Dusty's résumé.

After his zealotry got him booted from Sears' security and the San Diego police department, Foggo drew on his collegiate Young Republican connections to land a job in the early 1980s with the CIA. His first mission was in Honduras, then the staging ground for Ronald Reagan's secret paramilitary war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. In addition to his official duties, Foggo helped his old college buddy Brent Wilkes -- the defense contractor now implicated in the ongoing bribery case involving former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- bring conservative cadres down to Central America. There, he introduced them to anti-Sandinista rebels, better known as Contras. It seems that, even then, a lot more than anti-Communist solidarity was on the agenda. Three of Wilkes' former friends now claim that these trips included partying with prostitutes.

Dusty, of course, is not the only veteran of Reagan's Central American policy who has resurfaced to help fight George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror." The list includes John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter, John Bolton, Oliver North, Robert Kagan, and Michael Ledeen. They can also be found in the highest levels of the White House: Dick Cheney cut his political teeth in Congress in the 1980s plumping for Reagan's Nicaragua policy, thundering that any attempt to prohibit Contra aid was a legislative "abuse of power." And on the frontlines, James Steele, who led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with North to run weapons and supplies to the Contras, was sent to Iraq to help train a ruthless counterinsurgency force made up of ex-Baathist thugs. (Steele is batting two for two: As in El Salvador, such training has produced not security but widespread death-squad atrocities.) <more>

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/mother_of_all_scandals.html